[Blog Post] Peter Bakker on the VMS

[nickpelling]

Torsten: I understand the structure of your argument perfectly well. At the same time, it seems to me that the idea of edit distance autocopying that originally motivated that argument has had to be modified significantly along the way - the 'rules' of the underlying 'space' have had to be expanded from individual glyphs to groups of letters in order to keep the claim going, which is uncomfortable at best (somewhat tortured at worst).

This reminds me most of Gordon Rugg's claims, which similarly started out simple but had to be progressively modified along the way to overcome basic objections (in his case, line start, line end, Currier A vs B, then intermediate languages, and do on). In the end, his argument ended up being all special cases and no actual substance.

From my perspective, these are both arguments that try to explain away Voynichese rather than actually explain it. Features like Neal keys, line start, line end, themed languages, out of order line writing are problematic for every theory, whether cryptographic, linguistic, or hoax.

If Voynichese was essentially flat and language-like, then both autocopying and table generated text would be acceptable hypotheses, because that is exactly the kind of text you would expect them to produce.

Yet in your zeal to support autocopying, you spend all your efforts playing down all the difficult non-flat stuff, because those behaviours don't fit your model.

In my opinion, though, those are the most interesting parts of Voynichese as a system, because they fit nobody's model.

For example, I suspect that top-line Neal keys are the system's equivalent of a single-word rubric - a way of highlighting a word at the top of a page or paragraph. Clearly this isn't compatible with autocopying: but it's not something that deserves to be dismissed because it is incompatible with autocopying, because autocopying actually says nothing about those things it cannot explain.